Fawlty Showers 2

Bricklayer

The next day at work I explained to the group the difference between a brick stacker and a bricklayer.

“You can stack bricks to look like a wall, but it won’t hold up. A bricklayer arranges them in a pattern, and applies mortar. 

"The brick can be knowledge, a degree, a trade, maybe a position in life. The pattern is the daily habits providing strength and purpose to one’s life. Mortar is whatever holds it together, makes it real.”

I asked them how that applied to recovery.

“You can know all the slogans, but you’ll just be a dry drunk if you don’t practice them.”

“You can go through the Steps once to get them done or you can live them to really change.”

I nodded and asked the group to apply to the message to life.

“You can quote good and famous people, but it’s just memorization if you don’t follow their examples,” a woman said.  

 A young man is late twenties stared at his shoes and wiped away a tear. “Get her pregnant and you’re a name on a birth certificate. You have to take care of the kid to say you’re a father.”

I said to him, “When you leave here, you have a second chance to be a bricklayer, to be a father.”

 

Today I’ll be a bricklayer, not a brick stacker.

Fawlty Showers 2 is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and anyone you might know is purely coincidental.

Other works by Ken Montrose are available at:

• www.greenbriartraining.com 
• https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K8MG0S